When I was 18, I came home one day and my mom told me that she had bad news.
She then asked if I knew Justin Marquart, someone I knew from high school.
Then she told me why she had asked. Turned out he'd been murdered the night
before at the place he worked, along with his best friend. The manager had
been seriously injured, but she survived by playing dead and managed to call 911
and identify one of the robbers/killers. Three men, one who had a key, entered
shortly after closing, armed. They ordered everyone to lie down, and proceeded
to tie them up with duct tape. They didn't put up a fight at all. Then the
men slit their throats and knocked in the back of their skulls with a hammer.

I've never been a fighter, but ever since that day I've noticed a trend.
People are encouraged not to be heros. When confronted by an armed assaliant,
simply do whatever they tell you to do, and worry about the consequences later.
Schools enforce this. They allow those who harrass others to get away with
slaps on the wrist, but the few times someone stands up and defends themselves,
they get severely disciplined. So the police are no different. Don't try
to defend yourself. Don't try to stop your attacker/robber.
Let them walk all over you, its better than dying.

The strange thing is, this attitude is beneficial in the short term, but
creates serious problems in the long term. Yes indeed, you might survive a
robbery/rape, but your assailant gets away. He'll be able to strike again.
IF you stood up to him, yes you might have been injured or killed, but chances
are good it would have been the last time. These are not odds people like to
play, because its their life on the line, but in the long run, it works out
much better for everyone. If an armed robber knows that there's a 100%
possibility that he'll meet resistance, there will be a lot less armed robbers.
As it stands, the odds are in their favor. They have practically nothing to
lose just so long as there's not a police presence nearby.

I thought about this again after Columbine. Two kids with shotguns walked
around shooting at fleeing people. Its easy to hit a moving target that
doesn't fight back. If instead of running, everyone had jumped the gunmen,
there might have been 2-4 people wounded/killed instead of 15 dead, and
countless others wounded, not to mention extensive psychological issues with
an entire student body. But had this happened, had they been able to stop
them before they killed too many people, there would have been half a nation
congradulating them on their heroism, and the other half complaining about how
stupid they were.

To some extent, this has changed. On September 11, those that chose not
to be taken hostage managed to thwart the plans of a group of deranged
madmen who planned to use their plane as a weapon to kill many people. They
all died in the process, but their deaths saved countless others, and although
they were not victorious in saving the plane, fighting back was their only option to survive.
Since that fateful day, there has not been a successful hijacking of an
American plane. I doubt there will be one for the next 50 years. I can't
imagine anyone standing up, saying he's hijacking the plane, without 50
passengers immediately jumping on top of him, armed or otherwise. Ever since
9/11, passengers have taken the inititave responding to any threat, any
disgruntled passenger, any attempt to create trouble. There won't be anymore.
They refuse to take it. The days of sitting down and shutting up when someone
tries to take over the plane are over. The plane might go down in a blaze of
glory, but the hijackers WILL NOT WIN. EVER.

Which brings me to a current event. Early this morning, four people were
assaulted by a single armed man. At gunpoint, two abled bodied men allowed
themselves to be tied up and allowed their girlfriends to be kidnapped.
People, this is not about defending the honor of your girlfriend by beating
up the guy that called her ugly. This is about saving someone's life. These
TWO men were too coward to take on one man with a gun, because THEY might have
died in the process. Did you see them on camera? were they crying? Were
they heartbroken? Were they even worried? The girls they cared about the
most (supposively) were currently being held against their will by a dangerous
armed rapist. To you two girls, I think you can do better.

Yes, I know they're probably the same age. They're just kids. They're too
scared to take a stand. But we've trained them to be that way. We've all
grown up taking a lot for granted. We've allowed people to think that its
ok to beat someone up because they're not part of the popular crowd, but
when its serious, the solution is to cower up in a ball and just hope everything
will go away. Am I too harsh? Maybe. Would I be any different in that
situation? I don't know. But I know this. When someone's pointing a gun
at me, coming at me with a roll of duct tape, I'll remember Justin. I'll
remember how that turned out.

I removed the identd check from the web server. This results in a snappier
response on the initial connection for most users. It's not really a useful
feature anyway, as 99% of the visitors don't even have a valid identd server
running, and it just slows things down.

I've made a few minor background changes to the site. I might be making more
in the future. In addition, Erisynne has been kind enough to contribute a
logo, so check out her website if you're
interested in logos or other graphics development work. There's more info
about her on the visitors page.

I will also be updating the instructions and faq pages with regards to the
new layout and features. For a quick summary on the icons, the lightbulbs
represent the current state of the lamps at the time. The motion sensors
will light up red whenever they're tripped, and the computers show a windows
or penguin (linux) icon whenever they're on (depending on the OS they're
running), or the word "OFF" if they're not currently on. The names above
them are the hostnames. Some of these computers will be provided with some
degree of viewer control in the future, and I plan to add VNC support to a
couple of the computers I don't do critical work on so you can view the
desktop. No, I won't let you control it :)

Thanks to my dear sweet beautiful friend, I now have a domain.
http://drivemeinsane.com will now be the new address for the site instead
of using the ip address all the time. Its not working yet as of this
posting, but should be within the next 24 hours. I'll make changes everywhere
and maybe adapt the name to the site itself at that time.

In addition to spending money on me, she's also submitted her own icons
for the computers on the status table. Those cute slick computer icons are
her creation (or at least she stole and modified them herself. I'm not about
to complain about it either way :)

So now that she has made my day, someone needs to go visit
her site and buy some hosting services,
lest she try to exact retribution by making me her sex slave. shudders

You'll probably notice an extra row of lamp icons, including two motion sensors.
The porch lamp you can see at night when looking out the front door, and
the Xmas tree is not visible from any cam, but both of these lamps are on
the X10 network so I've included them. You can't control them right now, and
you will probably never be able to control the porch lamp as I don't want to
annoy my neighbors any more than absolutely necessary.

The two motion sensors will turn red for one minute anytime one of the
sensors is tripped. This doesn't do anything useful unless you're watching
all the time, but it might be interesting to notice it when people are
milling about in the rooms with sensors. Eventually it is my plan to add
more sensors around the house, so these things will become more active as
I add more.

The next set of icons to add will be the computer icons. Each computer on the
network will be represented by an icon that displays its current status.
Although most of the computers and other equipment will be operational at
all times, the doorbell server will need to monitor these things anyway,
especially the hub as part of the contingency plan to keep the network running
in case the hub locks up. Some computers might also have the reset switch
wired. The option to turn on, off, and reboot might show up on the page,
although they'll be darkened for regular users. Although there are 12
computers on the network, due to space requirements, not all of them might
be displayed. I'll see what I have to work with.

I actually completed something. The lightbulbs on the page now work. Despite
the fact that I've never solved the IE6 default cache problem, or found a
workaround to it, I just decided to rethink the strategy and change the code
to reduce the damage the lack of cache could do. Now when the lightbulbs
are displayed, they only copy the new image in if it changes. While this means
that the browser will still download the bulb images every time it changes,
at least it will only happen WHEN it changes, and not every second like before.

Queen has returned too. No, not the band. The lovely young lady on the
visitors page. She was only supposed to be
gone a week, but ended up missing for far longer. However, she has returned
and her captured pics page has more than doubled now. :)

Nothing terribly exciting happening. I've got 24 projects on the project
list now, probably another 50 or so to include once I think of them again.
Then I'll have to actually work on some of them. :) I've also kept up on
the object of the day, including adding an index to each of the object
pages to make accessing the others easier.

I won't be at home much this week, since I'm housesitting for my parents
while they're away. However, that gives me lots of time to work on some of
site code, especially the efforts to modularlize the site more. I might
even get user accounts implmented sometime this week.

Today is a VERY special day. Today is the end of an era, and the beginning
of a new one. Today is the day, that I can constantly bitch about all those
damn teenagers, and not have to make an exception for Leslie! Yes, today
she turns 20. FINALLY! Took ya long enough, geez!

So everyone be sure to wish her a happy birthday, and express your
condolances that the hairy guy is married (she'll know what you mean).
And if you're going to give her presents, I think she has a preference for
lacy, seethrough undergarments, which I'm sure she'll be happy to model on
her webcam. Well, maybe not for you. But for someone. :)

First off, I've added more pics to the slideshow. There's at least a day's
worth now, maybe more. I've got about 4 day's worth to add yet as soon as I'm
done going through them to clean out the empty rooms. At any time, I'll keep
up to 2 gigs worth online, thats enough for at least a week's worth of
pictures to go through. I'll burn them out and add new ones as the opportunities
arise.

I'm glad to see some people leaving comments. I encourage everyone to do so.
The more people that do, the more others will want to as well. Feel free to
jump in and add your own two cents. :)

For some technical stuff, I tore apart the universal remote. Wiring it up
should be pretty easy, although I was unable to test it with a diode. Of
course, I was using LED's instead of regular diodes, which have more
resistance, perhaps too much to make the connections. I'll have to pick up
some regular diodes and test that out. If the diodes work, then a single
transistor will also work. If not, I'll have to build a dual direction
transistor circuit, or use relays. Relays are combersome and require an
external power supply, so I'd like to avoid that option if possible.

I also opened up my VCR to find out why it was eating the tape. It inserts
the tape fine, and plays it fine, but when you eject the tape, it doesn't
properly recoil the tape, so its loose in the VCR with lots of places to catch
on. I'm not exactly sure what its supposed to do. I might just take it in
to get fixed if its not TOO expensive. It otherwise is a very good VCR. Hate
to have it go to waste. Although, its not worth TOO much in repair costs.

I've expanded the available slideshows. Now there's a more diverse set of
cam recordings available on the slideshow. Currently there's about a 20
hour set, but I'll be adding more so it will run 3-4 days without repeating.

On a completely unrelated note, those of you who have weak stomachs probably
want to wait a few days before checking the captured pics page. You've been warned.